New e-book: Housing, poverty and the good society: what can we achieve by 2025?

2017 marks the 75th anniversary of the Beveridge Report, which was heavily influenced by Beatrice and Sidney Webbâ€™s research on social reform. The report offered a post-war strategy for tackling housing poverty, including a cross-party consensus for a national affordable home building programme. Although the slum housing is no longer a driver of poverty on the scale it once was, we are today facing a modern housing crisis. In fact, housing still remains arguably the â€˜wobbly pillarâ€™ of the welfare state and in more and more areas homes to rent or buy are unaffordable to people on low to average incomes. Overcrowding and homelessness is increasing, housing conditions in the fast-growing private rented sector are deteriorating, and the gap between supply and demand keeps growing.

It is against this background that the Webb Memorial Trust (WMT) and the All Party Parliamentary Group on Poverty commissioned a series of policy-focused perspectives and opinion pieces on housing, poverty and the good society. They are seeking to inform and shape housing and anti-poverty strategies over the period to 2025, as part of the Webb Memorial Trustâ€™s programme to develop a new narrative on a good society without poverty, which draws on research from a wide range of leading organisations. Given the importance of housing to this narrative, the aim is to help forge a coalition of interests, inspired by Beveridge and the Webbs, and a lasting commitment to longer-term, preventative solutions. The viewpoints complement the latest report by the WMT on housing â€˜Social Housing and the Good Societyâ€™.

Social Housing and the Good Society:Â Policy Futures Report This is a the final report for the Webb Memorial Trust byÂ the University of Birmingham’s Housing and CommunitiesÂ Research GroupÂ exploring change in... Read More

Insecurity has become pervasive. It permeates the lives not just of the marginalised but also the reasonably well off.Â In/securityÂ is not simply the latest politicalÂ fad restricted to the chattering classes,... Read More